


Taking Up Slack

by Cheloya



Category: One Piece
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-10-27 06:56:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10804080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cheloya/pseuds/Cheloya
Summary: Old, imported. Sanji is busy. Sanji is always busy. Zoro disapproves.





	Taking Up Slack

If there was one thing Zoro was known for, it was not his patience. And it wasn’t his charm, either, or his looks, and it sure as hell wasn’t his manners, because he didn’t care about that crap, or most of the people it mattered to. In his experience, manners made losers faster than he could count to ten. Well, faster’n Nami could count to ten, anyway – which wasn’t the point. The point was that the stupid cook was being stupid. As usual.

The problem was not, in the swordsman’s opinion, that Zoro took too long. That had never occurred to Zoro as being a problem, ever – in fact, he’d always seen it as kind of a perk, but apparently there was only a certain amount of Zoro-time to be slotted into the stupid cook’s day. And once that time was up – once Sanji realised with the flailing panic that only a cook could summon that there was food on his stove about to be ruined with over-cooking, or over-concentration – that was it. He’d drop whatever (or whoever, in this case) he was doing and rush right back to his workstation.

The problem was that Sanji still expended far too much effort on the females on board.

And definitely not enough on what (or who) he was supposed to be doing.

He’d brought this up, of course, in his own way – which, he admitted grudgingly, was more or less to grab the cook’s wrist as he attempted to make it back to the galley and to demand where the hell he thought he was going. Which had earned him a kick to the head, and the elbow, and a grumpy cook instead of just a snippy one.

And when he’d tried to bring it up afterward, while they were grudgingly washing the dishes side by side, all he’d gotten was a glare and a snarky statement to the effect that if Zoro had to feed Luffy twelve meals a day and think about _half_ the things Sanji had to think about when he was putting said meals together, he wouldn’t have a whole lot of time left, either – in fact, he’d have none, because his head would probably explode and deprive them all of his _sparkling conversation_.

And that had been the end of that, because Zoro had grit his teeth and slammed down the dishcloth as effectively as dishcloths could be slammed, and stormed outside to lift more weights before he tried to do the cook some actual damage.

It wasn’t like it was his fault the damn cook was so damn busy all the time, he reasoned darkly. And it wasn’t like Zoro could just make more hours in the day or something to make things easier on the chef. And it wasn’t like he had many hours to sacrifice, anyway, because although he could sort of _coast_ if he cut his training back, he’d never get stronger that way, and he wasn’t about to give up _his_ dreams just so the stupid cook could continue to make shaved ice for their navigator whenever she damn well felt like it.

He thought about that for a while, when he was done with the weights, staring up at the sky and drifting scraps of cloud, and wrestled with himself over it a little bit.

When it came over cloudy-like-rain instead of just cloudy, he picked himself up and went into the galley and stood there with his arms crossed until Sanji whirled around, balancing two bowls on one arm and flipping eggs with the other hand, and snapped, “What?” He was flushed from the heat of the galley, strands of hair clinging to his face with a fine sweat,

Zoro was silent for a few sullen seconds before he turned his head and glared at the wall and muttered, “You want some help, or something?”

Sanji stared at him for a minute, limbs still moving on autopilot. He looked like he couldn’t decide whether to take the swordsman seriously, or whether he was about to fall into a trap about admitting to needing the swordsman’s help.

“Because I thought,” Zoro blundered on, “maybe you could, uh, come give me a hand. With training. Uh. If you had a bit more time on your hands.”

For a minute, he wasn’t sure whether Sanji was going to agree, or throw the bowls at him and start the meal again. But when he was done flipping the eggs, he blinked a few times, and poured one of the bowls into a waiting pot, and set the other one down on the bench.

“I guess you can... um. Broach a new cask for me. And. And chop things, or something. If I show you how.” It’s like he’d never considered how to make his galley operate with other people involved. Zoro had thrown him off-balance. It was kind of cute, with the heat flush and the puzzlement. “C’mere.”

He chopped an onion in front of Zoro, first, and when Zoro butchered the other half completely, he sighed and tried to position himself behind Zoro, to manoeuvre the knife with Zoro’s hands. Given their relative sizes, and breadths, this didn’t work too well. Eventually, Sanji ducked under Zoro’s arms, tsking with impatience, and laid his hands on top of Zoro’s own, elbows tight against his sides so as not to impede the swordsman’s movement.

“Like this,” he instructed briskly. This time, the diced onion came out actually diced into neat little cubes, and not in misshapen chunks. Zoro suspected that was more Sanji’s doing than his own, but it wasn’t all bad, standing here with his chin on the cook’s head and his arms around the cook’s waist, however loose that embrace might have been. “With your knuckle against the blade,” Sanji murmured, vaguely. “So you don’t cut your fingers off, stupid marimo.”

Zoro made an indistinct, lazy sound, and then opened his mouth on the back of Sanji’s neck, grinning as he felt the chef tense. “Yeah,” he agreed. “You’ll need those pretty soon.”

Sanji kicked him in the shin.


End file.
